WE TRAVEL TO AND SHALL BE LOST IN ALWAYS

a thesis by William Miller

This project is different from anything I’ve done before. It’s much more personal and intimate. In fact, it goes deep into my chromosomes and the cells of my brain. Eight years ago, when I was 40 years old I found out that I had Huntington’s disease. We Travel To And Shall Be Lost In Always uses video, installation and photography to highlight my personal experiences with this fatal neurodegenerative disease as well as draw relationships between my own failing memory and the crisis of the deterioration of digital files, media and storage known as “bit rot.”

Huntington’s disease (HD) is an inherited neurodegenerative disease that causes the progressive breakdown of nerve cells in the brain. The early physical symptoms include loss of balance, reduced dexterity, involuntary jerking or writhing (called chorea), slurred speech and difficulty swallowing. Victims are often given to bouts of unpredictable and even violent behavior. HD is typically diagnosed between the ages of 35 and 45, proceeding inexorably to death in 10 to 20 years. There is no cure and no treatment to slow or halt the progression. It’s been called the cruelest disease known to man.

Due to my short-term memory loss and cognitive fogginess, I’ve become reliant on smart devices to help remind me of appointments, keep track of the days, to retain my thoughts and ideas. These mnemonic devices have become an extension of my memory but study after study shows that the machines we’ve surround ourselves with to enhance our memory are actually damaging it. Certainly, with them we have more access to facts, figures and our personal memory archive of notes, images and correspondences but without them we’re becoming more forgetful. Furthermore, much of the technology we use are flawed, vulnerable to corruption and subject to obsolescence.

While my thesis is built around a suite of videos, which I describe below, it also includes the photographic series JPG Portrait (2017, Archival Pigment Print. Starting as conventional studio portraits of myself, I use Photoshop to resize and compress the digital file thereby erasing a great deal of information from the files. Rebuilt using 3D tools, these images emulate the tendency of human memory to deteriorate but then rebuild itself, sometimes inaccurately.

In the video Unlucky (2016, Video, 3:45 minutes) an audio track features a lone voice telling a first-person story about going to the hospital and receiving a diagnosis for Huntington’s disease. As the story progresses it becomes clear that mistakes, miscues and flubs have been kept in the audio, highlighting the fact that the reading is a performance. But is it from memory, an account, or read from a script? The video’s visuals show a 3-D scan of my head. It seems to be turning intermittently by an unseen force.

In the video Sullen Entropy (2016, Video, 6:11 minutes) I appropriated text from a closed group Facebook page for victims of Huntington’s disease their families and caregivers. They share their intensely personal and occasionally harrowing stories about living with HD. I then print the posts, with their sloppy spelling, poor grammar and other marks of emotional and physical haste, I scan the prints and put the files through a photogrammetric process that causes the text to decay and distort and break apart. I piece several of the posts together to form a loose narrative in which I’m trying to convey something more than the account of their individual experiences. This piece is projected on a wall or screen, highlighting its ephemerality.

The video Hexenzsene (2017, Video, 1:19 minutes) is shown on a vertical screen. It opens on a table devoid of objects or people. Soon a violet ball floats down, in slow motion, from the top of the screen. It hits the table hard with a distorted crash and slowly bounces up to the top of the screen. The ball bounces in extreme slow motion several more times until it moves inexplicably toward the precipice of the table edge and comes crashing down out of sight but still within earshot.

The video, Self Test (2016, Video, 2:38 minutes), features me in a studio environment doing a standard neurological exam that is given by doctors to assess motor and sensory responses, especially reflexes, to determine whether the nervous system is impaired. People with HD are frequently giving themselves these kinds of tests, looking nervously for ticks or hand shaking associated with early stages of Huntington’s. For them, the consequence of finding flaws in these neurological self tests are profound and life changing.

The video Frames and Focus (2017, Video, 1:53 minutes) pens of a shot of my face in a studio environment. A child’s hands emerge from the bottom of the screen and start to push my cheeks together. A low, slowed down voice can be heard encouraging the action. The child, who is my son, slaps, squeezes and smushes my face, sometimes enthusiastically, sometimes reluctantly, while I try to keep my eyes straight ahead.

Lastly, my thesis includes a sculptural installation, Untitled (In Lieu) (2017, artificial flowers, electric turntable, foam core), using fake plastic flowers often used to memorialize gravesites. Flowers are a powerful symbol of birth and death, of celebration and mourning, of commemoration and memory. During my own trips to cemeteries, I noticed fresh graves typically have freshly cut flowers whereas older graves tended to have artificial flowers— grief and mourning over time is replaced by commemoration and memory. Collected and sorted by color, the plastic petals are placed them on a rotating surface in the graduated color wheel. The spinning color wheel looks similar to an Apple computer’s expression of thinking when it gets hung up in operations. The “spinning wheel of death” is the computer’s signal that it is struggling to remember.

Life Drawing

a thesis film by Yi Qian

Family is of the utmost concern to me. I started making art works using my family members as the main subject at the very beginning of my career as an artist. For my thesis project I decided to make a film based on my family history. There are three generations of artists in my family tree, going back to my grandfather on my mother’s side. This film is about roles artists play in culture and history which can be manifested in how we walk on the road to becoming artists. I hope it will give viewers an opportunity to learn about what it is like to be an artist in China and that encourages them to think about their own future developments.

As artists, my grandfathers on both my father and my mother’s side, my parents and I are different in many ways. Why and how did we enter the gate of art? How did we learn the skills of making art? What do we think are the biggest challenges artists face? For those watching the film, all those questions will be answered or discussed. And viewers will not only learn about the personal experiences of the artists in my family, but also understand a bit about the dramatic changes that happened in China after World War Two and how we each formed our worldviews and sense of values under the influence of the political and economic environments of the time periods we’ve lived in and through.

Speaking of worldviews, there are huge experiential and aesthetic differences between the different generations in my family. To be more specific, painting posters for the government was my grandfather’s job to make a living. The most influential event during his lifetime was the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1976). At that time, not only artists but all highly educated people were considered dangerous to society by our government. They and their families were humiliated and persecuted like public enemies. Before that era started, my grandfather spent his spare time painting portraits for my grandmother and going into nature to make landscape paintings. But in 1966, he was forced to stop painting landscapes and the only portraits he could paint were of the great leader of the Communist Party and the country, Chairman Mao.

My grandfather has no desire to fight for free will in his heart, because he thought there was nothing wrong in the idea that all art related activities were serving the government as the party’s propaganda tools. What he chose to believe in kept him and our family out of the harm’s way. But not every artist or those who did art related works was as ‘lucky’ as he was. Giving up making his own art was not the only compromise he made. When my mother showed her interest in painting, he was not happy about it at the very beginning, because he thought becoming a painter was not a good career choice for a girl. But after my mother proved her determination, he chose to respect that and gave her his full support. Coincidently, the same plot twist happened between my father and me, after I told him that I wanted to be a filmmaker. How history repeats itself fascinates me.

For my parents, they had the chance to make their own art and their love for painting came from the bottom of their hearts. Unfortunately, after the Economic Reform and Opening in 1978, Chinese society changed again, and this time was filled with and shaped by material desires. In order to survive, lots of artists in that curtail moment had to abandon their dreams and having no relationship with art or just used their art making skills to make money. My parents joined at second group of people. When my parents were young, they learned how to paint at masters’ homes and they didn’t need to pay their mentors anything. There were no organizations or schools to teach children painting skills. The whole art world at that time was based on one-on-one master and apprentice relationships. After 1978, Chinese society became extremely competitive. Parents started investing more and more money in their children’s education. And painting was one of many skills they thought their children needed to master in order to give them competitive advantages in the future. My parents, for example, built up a school to teach children to paint and, as result, economically benefited from it. Since then, they had no spare time for making their own arts for a very long time because they were busy with teaching and managing. They promised themselves that they would pick up their brushes again, once they were sure that I would have a promising future.

Speaking of my generation’s experience, the College Enrollment Expansion program implemented by our government in 1999 played a huge rule in our lives. In most cases, the results of this one test shape a student’s destiny. Getting high scores of this test in order to be accepted by college became most of Chinese parents’ ultimate goal for their children’s education. Both parents and their children are under huge pressure and willing to do almost anything to achieve this goal. For example, students who have neither interests nor talents in becoming artists choose to apply for art academies, because you can get in with lower scores than regular colleges require, as long as you pass special exams designed specifically for art students.

My parents started training me in their school, as well, when I was around ten. And in order to give me an even better chance to get into the best art academy, they even sent me to another more ‘professional’ training center before I took the test. I tried my best and passed that exam, even though I clearly understand that painting wouldn’t be my choice as a way to make art. The psychological struggles I experienced while doing something against my will was the price I paid for getting into a college located in Shanghai, one of the most international and developed cities in China. Fortunately, it’s now possible for the people of my generation to go abroad. And the years I spent in Shanghai really opened my eyes and helped me find the courage to pursue my dreams as an artist in America after I graduated.

As I mentioned in previous paragraphs, there are neither total ‘heroes’ nor ‘villains’ in my family tree. And my film will not be about critiquing the decisions my family made and the opinions we held before. In reviewing how we faced challenges as artists living in China, I realized that the beauty of humanity is not only found in extreme situation and reactions, but also in the compromises we make and the struggles we each have. I believe when people are focusing on doing one same thing, like watching a film together, they will create a special energy. My long-term career goal is making films that can help people build connections with each other and call on them, especially artists, to develop their sense of social responsibility.

László Moholy-Nagy, one of photography’s great visionaries, once stated that the “scientific and technological advances [of photography] almost amount to a psychological transformation of our vision.” Relatively simple advances in mechanics and science unveiled remarkable new ways of seeing a once-familiar world. For Moholy-Nagy, this “trained our powers of observation to a higher standard of visual perception than ever before. Photography imparts a heightened and increased power of sight in terms of time and space” (in Bell & Traub, 2015, p 70). In the years between 1880 and 1918, technological developments in photography and the moving image contributed to what Kern called a “reorientation” and a “transformation of the dimensions of life and thought” (1983, pp 1-2).

With this in mind, I intend for my work to shed light on how computer-generated visuals differs from older forms of representation, and how this might affect our perception of the world today. Even though 3D computer-generated visuals mimic lens based media, merge with them, and are used and understood within the same framework, they originate from completely different technical and theoretical concepts.

Technological advances in photography and video and the qualities that separate the two, has often given “rise to incompatible yet intertwined ideas about the truth of images and the understanding of time and motion” (Campany, 2008, p 22). What shapes our use and understanding of the media often stems from how the image relates to our experience of the word, and the critical question has often been how our experience of the world is best represented – is it by the static detail made visible by the still photograph, showing us what our eyes cannot see? Or is it by the reanimation of movements made possible by the moving image, showing us a more immediate form of our experience?

With 3D computer-generated visuals, a new form of representation is possible. Two qualities that differentiate it from older means of representation are its seemingly endless possibilities and its ability to run continuously and indefinitely. While a photograph is a collaboration between the photographer and the world in front of her, a 3D computer-generated image is a collaboration between the maker and her imagination and memory of the world. With 3D computer-generated visuals, there is no ‘real time’, no speed or slow-motion. Thereby the medium allows for a representation which is no longer dependent on external factors. This also allows for a temporal shift, from a time related to our body and earth’s rotation to a more fluid and individual time.

On, Towards and in Front of Time consists of three computer simulations shown on three separate screens and a sound piece, all installed in a wooden structure. The structure is an architectural space based on a grid-pattern, mimicking temporary walls – creating a fragmented room.

It is a place in flux; simultaneously in a process of construction and deconstruction. Parts of the structure are not fastened but stand in balance – conveying a moment suspended in time.

In my search for the timeliness imbedded in computer-generated visuals I have created three timescapes or scenes, which work as simulations. They are not set animations or video loops, but run by algorithms, like a videogame that plays itself. They can in theory run infinitely – that is, until the hardware breaks or the software crashes. They mimic reality, even though they are rooted more in my imagination than in the physical world.

In one timescape, a turtle walks around in a seemingly eternal void. In another, a sphere rotating 360 degrees around a center, mimics a clock moving in real time. A swinging pendulum hints to another means of time measurement. These symbols of time, which are grounded to earth, emphasize the lack of time within the computer-generated space – or rather its disconnect with the measured time we know. None of them follow the rhythm of real time but follow a beat written in the algorithm that generates each one.

The sound piece emphasizes this disconnect further by telling the story of the New York Telephone Company’s Time Bureau. This was a service started in 1928, which provided New Yorkers with the correct time whenever they called. Offering callers access to the World Standard Time, the Time Bureau grew rapidly in popularity and reach as the telephone network expanded through the decades after its inception. The story consists of facts and statistics on the service, as well as fictitious anecdotes relating to these facts. It is a story about a search for a connection between a private, subjective time and a collective, measured present moment in time. Thereby the sound piece explores an example of how new technologies changed general perceptions of time in the beginning of the twentieth century from a local based time to an inclusive global network of ‘now’. As Kern argues: “Telephone switchboards, telephonic broadcasts, daily newspapers, World Standard Time, and the cinema mediated simultaneity through technology. … In an age of intrusive electronic communication ‘now’ became an extended interval of time that could, indeed must, include events around the world.” (1983, p 314).

By juxtaposing the story of the Time Service with the 3D computer-generated simulations, placed in an unstable structure, I suggest that a similar shift in our perception of time is happening now. With the new temporal opportunities in 3D computer-generated images, times is more fluid, moldable, and indefinite. This widens our perspective; new possibilities occur and a reverse or a non-linear time is easier to imagine and much more likely to exist.

Maybe what I suggest we are seeing now is merely a continuation of reactions and questions that arose around turn of the twentieth century. But as computer generated visuals continually become a bigger part of how we create images of the world and how we see it represented, I find it fascinating to engage with this relatively new medium and to experiment with what I think are new temporal opportunities.

i forgot where we were...

Excerpt from a thesis by Johnnie Chatman

Grand Canyon, 2017

I Forgot Where We Were... uses constructs and idioms of the West and western landscape photography as allegorical elements to facilitate a conversation on black identity as it reconfigures itself against media, historical, and trans-global narratives. Vantage points around the West act as intersectional beacons for explorations of culture, history and consumerism, as rich histories are compressed into marketable cultural capital.

Great Sand (South), 2017

In pursuing this route my project explores the ambiguity and multiplicity of blackness oscillating between a space of romance and critique, objective research and personal narrative. The dialogue produced between what is said and what is not - creates meaning that is as complicated as it subtle, ironic or conflicting. Through this, it is never assured that the act of signifying will yield for the audience the desired payoff. Representation of the black body in the context of the American West - that has too often been, as Neil Campbell describes, defined by binary and reductionist grids of thought and image when, in fact, it’s more than geography, it is a complex, unstable signifier that has been given meaning by those who have lived within it, passed through it, conquered it, settled, farmed, militarized, urbanized, and dreamed it.

Arches, 2017

From the choice of black and white self portraits, to the clothing and posture of the body, the body of work reminds us of the constructed-ness of the real, the fact that a thing is being represented. The work aims to position a conversation outside of the restricted understanding of black expression through the limitations and expectations of outward expression and resistance. With the creation of an ambiguous space, a seemingly romantic fascination is met with an examination of the past and present through metaphorical representations of history, time and the landscape.

Rhyolite, 2017

As writer Michael Johnson once questioned,

> The American West with its landscapes that invite identification but do not offer definition and with its absence of black communities, provides a particularly appropriate setting for a post-soul interrogation of black identity. The walls of the gorge are as concrete as black people and white people, but what if one’s sense of self falls in the space between these concrete defining categories? Even if a vast space of possible identities exists between these two positions, how does one establish a definable and stable sense of self in the face of such vastness?

THE DRIVE: 6DAYS 4392KM 30000YUAN

THE DRIVE: 6DAYS 4392KM 30000YUAN is an observational documentary film, which is about a truck driver’s cross-country journey across China into Tibet. The film observes Tibetan and Mainland Chinese local, common culture and modernization. The aim of the project is to present, from an observer’s view, fluid and subtle pictures of the culture itself: its people, its landscape, its economy. All are struggling and reforming between the old and the new, the traditional and the modern.

The film is slow, no dramas. The primary narrative is the trip itself which is sequenced chronologically. From loading goods in a small city in southeastern China, to being on the road, and unloading the goods in Lhasa, Tibet.

The work acts to make an adventure of movement and space. It’s about experiencing and living through the long journey. The visuals become about pictures and what they represent; in expanded and compressed time.

There are two elements in this observation. One, focuses on the cross-country journey of a truck and its driver. Showing the driver’s ordinary life in the vehicle: driving, filling up with gas, parking, eating, drinking, smoking, peeing, counting money, etc. While the journey stretches out gradually we incorporate Tibet, its land, its people and visitors, grand and in detail, ordinary and beautiful. They happen simultaneously, both routine. Different people with different purposes but ultimately, the same destination.

On the road, the driver becomes part of the moving truck whose only mission is to go from one place to another. There is no Kerouacian fantasy, nor experience of a spiritual journey, nor rebelling against the triviality of ordinary life. The journey is business. The six days on the road are necessary and, at the same time, meaningless. When the doors of the cargo truck are re-opened in Lassa, the goods in the truck blink their eyes and are in a different place. The 4392-km road is abstracted. In this trip the destination, Tibet, has been separated from myth and dragged back into modernization as the truck’s destination.

Anders Jones

My interdisciplinary practice includes sculpture, video, photography and mixed-media assemblage. These images reflect past work that investigates the psychological trauma, fragmented ideas on identity, and the limited access to the American Dream experienced by an often-overlooked, dignified and hard-working segment of the African American community. The work speaks through allegory, metaphor and narratives that utilize everyday objects and the aesthetic pleasure of materials to create a familiar point of entry that then turns into an eerie and unsettled feeling, seducing viewers into further investigation.

The two triptych series, Ota Benga (2017) and Psychological Warfare (2017), explore the integration of found photographs printed on photographic paper and textured fabrics that are cut and re-assembled. In American Dream (2017) I made a macramé basketball hoop with woven netting in the form of a noose, a comment on the paradox of basketball as one of the few aspirational options for young African American men.

Gone But Not Forgotten (skelly hands) (2017) conjures the idea of play through its reference to the street game skelly; however, the disembodied hands are a metaphor for the shortened lives of black male youth due to police brutality and mass incarceration.

Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler

Hurricanes regularly occur in New Orleans. Every three years or so when I was growing up, a storm would be big enough to cause my parents concern. The local news would track it and we watched to see if New Orleans was in its crosshairs. If it looked like it was going to make landfall nearby, we fled by car to another southern city, deeper inland, and waited in a hotel room for the storm to pass. These evacuations were scary, exciting, and deeply unsettling. I still carry the anxiety with me, which becomes acute between June and November, the length of hurricane season.

New Orleans is a place that inspires me and is my interior landscape. When I go back to visit my parents, my brothers and sister, nieces and nephews, aunts and uncles, I am not so compelled to make pictures of family, but of place. I make photographs in New Orleans so that it becomes a part of me. The act of photographing makes me feel connected to New Orleans because I can shape and possess an image of it. I often worry the city will disappear before I can return.

It has recently been reported that glaciers in Antarctica are releasing sheets of ice that could increase global sea level by more than two feet. Seas that rise will make tropical storms more likely to release damaging floods. All over the world, coastal cities are rethinking their relationship to and redrawing the barriers between land and water. In the United States, global warming is increasing the frequency of hurricanes that reach the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

My family has been directly affected by these changes. Hurricane Katrina put my parent’s New Orleans home under 10 feet of water. The water stayed for 14 days, destroying the home and the neighborhood where I grew up.

This project is an investigation into man-made structures that are designed to protect this fragile place. I am photographing drainage pumping stations, levees, outfall canals, and floodwalls in Orleans, St. Bernard, and Jefferson parishes, built to control water and save the city from submergence. But are these structures equipped to provide safety for New Orleans? Or are they just attempts to slow down what is inevitable, the complete submergence of my home?

The title, Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler, is a Cajun French expression that translates to “Let the good times roll.” To live in New Orleans is to live in denial: denial about climate change, denial about how many calories are in a fried oyster po-boy, denial about the headache after a night spent drinking on Bourbon Street. In a city that can be spontaneously swallowed up in streams of celebration, refusing to acknowledge the threat of submergence is a part of living here. I want my images to be a reminder to viewers that for all its foolishness and fun due to lack of good judgment, New Orleans is facing potentially tragic circumstances.

New Orleans is usually lush and colorful, filled with overgrown tropical vegetation for most of the year. However, over the months I was working on this project, the city was in the grips of an unusually severe winter. Freezing temperatures killed much of the vegetation. This left the landscape with a brownish grey palette, a pallor similar to the way the city looked after Hurricane Katrina, when everything was cloaked in a layer of brown mud left by the receding water. These images are void of people, adding to the post-apocalyptic feeling. Except for a house or a graffiti tag, there are few traces of human presence. I want viewers to imagine what the city will feel like once it is no longer inhabitable. This is the New Orleans I remember the month after Hurricane Katrina when civilians were not allowed back into the city.

New Orleans’ relationship to water is what caused French explorer Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne to choose this place to found a city in 1718. These first settlers chose the natural levees on the banks of the Mississippi, which were formed by accumulated sediment at the mouth of the river. This marshy land would grow to become a great port city, easily accessible by the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. Like most aging cities the center began to sprawl but there was only so far to go before the ground turned to marsh. Water had to be removed from the landscape to accommodate the expanding city and to deal with the regular flooding that occurred since it’s founding.

The job of the drainage pumping stations in New Orleans is to keep water from remaining by pushing excess rainwater collected by storm drains through outfall canals into Lake Pontchartrain, the large body of water north of New Orleans. The pumps are maintained by the Sewerage and Water Board, a city agency founded in 1899. This agency not only maintains the pumps, but also handles the city’s potable water supply as well as its raw sewerage. The Sewerage and Water Board recently came under fire because during an August 5, 2017 flood, several pumps were inoperable and neighborhoods flooded. Hurricane Katrina occurred on August 29, 2005. It is not encouraging that just ten years later this system, which is supposed to protect New Orleans, failed again during an unexpected heavy rain, not even a tropical storm. The climate conditions that existed when these pumps were built in the early 20th century no longer exist. Global warming has increased the severity of weather events and likelihood of system strain.

Over time, all of the structures put into place to save New Orleans
are causing the problems that are making it even more susceptible to water. For a city created and surrounded by water, it is virtually absent from the landscape. The levees and retaining walls, maintained by the United States Army Corps of Engineers, are preventing water
from flowing back into the land and depositing sediment. It is flooding that has kept New Orleans above sea level.

Richard Campanella, a geographer with Tulane University, has written extensively on the subject. In a recent article for The Atlantic he states: What was beginning to happen was anthropogenic soil subsidence—the sinking of the land by human action. When runoff is removed and artificial levees prevent the river from overtopping, the groundwater lowers, the soils dry out, and the organic matter decays. All this creates air pockets in the soil body, into which those sand, silt, and clay particles settle, consolidate—and drop below sea level.

By the time my classmates and I have hung our thesis show, the 2018 hurricane season will have begun. I am aware that in a year, these places I have photographed may be changed or will have disappeared. This gives me a sense of urgency to continue this project, to possess a disappearing place I already miss.

Within the social and political climate into which I entered, I could never be Miss America. I was ready for America, but she was not ready for me. So began my attempt to define an identity that would embrace my multi­-cultural upbringing, assert my multi-ethnic makeup, and oscillate between “visitor” and “native” in a battle of the pressure to assimilate and the desire to retain allegiance to specific cultural practices and definitions of beauty.

The goal of my thesis project is to build this virtual museum called the “Museum of Science Fetish.” Just like we’ve objectified and commodified about everything—inventions, social relations, politics, art, gender—science, too, has become an object of desire, a fetish. Museums keep fetish objects safe and promote their uniqueness. Although science is often regarded as an objective process, the ways we look at science is often the opposite—we fetishize it. My goal is to discuss the phenomena of science fetishism through the subject of thought experiments.

I am an observer of people and personalities and have always been interested in what faces have to say and the stories they tell. Shortly after college came a vocation in vaudeville, which led to documenting my acts and thus began my career in video and performance art. Through characters I mimic come the stories about lives that parallelmy experience.